And at last, through studying a series of gay male writers, I began to realise that the poetry of everyday tenderness can be just as heart-stoppingly moving as the poetry of yearning. Repeatedly, even when my subject was not romantic, I found myself directly addressing him. How could I write requited heterosexual love poetry? Would it not simply be sentimental slop? Does literature not end when the lovers finally kiss? After a while though, he began to figure as a character in my poems – saving my disastrous ‘Fantasy Dinner Party’ by doing the washing up bringing me tea when I had a cold cutting his foot on glass at a full moon party. At first, still under the influence of Plath & Co, I found this rendered my poetic voice mute. Then, at university, I met my now-husband, Richard. The men we know are just as complicated and vulnerable as ourselves. Finally, I think I began to realise that I am part of a new generation of feminist writers who find that the crudely cartoon versions of men as Nazis or Bastards (or chauvinistic ‘pigs’ in more recent texts such as Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife) are no longer relevant. It is also often an entreaty – occasionally to be loved but, more importantly, to be understood. I find my most successful poetry is intimate, addressed to a particular ‘you’ rather than to a general poetry audience. Eventually, when this strategy failed (poetry frightens teenage boys), I turned on him in The Last Love Poem – in a manoeuvre that highlights how, for all the poet’s prostration before their muse, there’s always a more complicated power-relationship at play:īut despite renouncing him, a pattern had been set. Howard became my first muse, and I began to write seriously partly in a futile effort to seduce him – the result being my first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo. And although I enjoyed attempting my own ‘strip tease’, I found my gaze repeatedly drifting away from the mirror and back to the object of my affection. Even as I attempted, Plath-like, to rail against Howard Buckley – a doe-eyed, gangly-limbed lad at my school who I pined for during Sixth Form – I couldn’t help but think about how lovely looking he was. I was perpetually in a state of unrequited love over some boy. I was always very much a father’s girl, and my closest friends have usually been male. Next to their glorious intense aliveness, the men in their work seemed crude monsters or paper-dolls.Īnd yet, I liked men. Their poetry was ‘the big strip tease’, a series of symptom recitals, suicide notes and strange, sexy self-portraits. Whilst heterosexuality was at the heart of all their poetry – the psychiatric doctor, the Daddy, the Zoo-Keeper, Rumpelstiltskin, the ‘damn man’ who ‘breaks your heart in two’– it seemed clear to me that these women were their own muses. Apparently raw in their honesty, yet extremely artful, I learnt how each put on a performance of self calculated to shock, seduce and move. I devoured their poems, their prose, their lives. My passion for poetry began in my early teens, when I developed a crush on three female writers – Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath.
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